Have a butcher's

I'd take a day off work more often if I thought it would end in 2,000 words done and another chapter completed.

The list of "beats" I didn't manage to get in is getting longer than the list of random stuff I'm hoping to cut out when I go into re-writes. I wanted to explain more about Guy's unhappy life during the sword fight scene but it didn't quite happen. But I did get some tweaks in today that explain better how Penny is using the sword fight to taunt him into giving up useful information.

Yeah, that's the method a lot of writers use, according to an unscientific browsing of Quora answers. For each day's writing, re-read the previous day and do a little light editing. This is less about the editing and more about remembering exactly where you left off.

So this was the chapter with RAF slang, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Jackie Cochran and the Attagirls, and the strange life and career of Orde Wingate.

I was surprised at how fast it went.

Or, rather, the actual writing went fast. I spent the morning staring at the list of beats I was going to try to hit with no idea how I could line them up to best effect. I finally opened Scrapple and started dragging them around and sort of like building a molecule or solving a puzzle once I had three that hooked together the rest fell almost immediately into place.

And that's a great feeling. Pretty much high point of the day, though closing another chapter is a good one as well.

Also threw more of my reference materials up on my Wordpress site. It is still annoying but it works well enough for what I'm doing (and I'm surely doing far more than the traffic will ever warrant.)

I also ran into a book -- series rather -- at Amazon that was rather interesting. The description was of very rote space opera. There was a big typo right in the middle of the blurb, too. And almost fifty reviews, which were slanted heavily into the five-star range.

And I looked, and not only were a lot of these basically re-phrasing what was said in the blurb, they also all had certain grammatical/typographical errors that, at least to me, felt of a kind.

I can't swear this is a man gaming the system. He must be doing something right, though; he's in the top ten in more than one category!

Downloaded the sample to read. Hrm. Not formatted well, that's for sure. Workmanlike, at least. Isn't getting my interest though. I'll reserve a full opinion for now.